| |
| author | Micaela Rose Reininga |
| title | The Effect of Context Cues on Emotion Recognition |
| abstract | The central focus of the current experiment is to better understand what cues children use when identifying emotions.
It has been established that children as young as 4 years of age can use contextual cues when identifying emotions (Kuwabara, Son, & Smith, 2011). This
study had two hypotheses: 1) The first is that children and undergraduate student participants will be affected more by people context cues than by object
context cues, and 2) the second is that participants will report higher levels of emotion intensity for the emotion shown in the congruent situations as
compared to the incongruent situations. There was a total of 50 participants, 26 children and 24 adults. The participants were instructed to pick the
appropriate facial expression for a target cartoon figure when the target was presented next to positive and negative objects, and cartoon characters
who were each expressing either positive or negative emotions. The participants were then asked to rate the strength of the emotion the target character
was displaying using a line scale. Both congruent and incongruent situations and positive and negative emotions were displayed. Participants completed
20 trials. The analysis indicated that the object context cues had a larger impact on participants' emotion intensity ratings than the people context
cues. Further, congruency affected emotion intensity ratings, and yielded higher emotion strengths in the congruent situations as compared to the
incongruent situations. These findings indicate that Object context cues were used as a context cue when determining the strength of the emotions
depicted, and that People context cues were not used as a context cue. These findings indicate that Objects are important for providing context
information and that in the future these cues should be incorporated in helping with successful social interactions. |
| school | The College of Liberal Arts, Drew University |
| degree | B.A. (2017) |
| advisor | Dr. Hilary Kalagher |
| committee | Dr. Jessica Lakin
Dr. Caitlin Killian |
| full text | MRReininga.pdf |
| |
